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Brother, can you spare a few billion?

By DAVID IGNATIUS, Washington Post Writers Group
Published December 17, 2007

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WASHINGTON

When airport rescue crews are worried that a damaged plane may have a crash landing, they sometimes spread the runway with foam - to reduce the probability of fire on impact. That's what the Federal Reserve and other central banks are doing now in pumping liquidity into severely damaged financial markets.

Make no mistake: The central bankers' announcement Wednesday of a new coordinated effort to pump cash into the global financial system is a sign of their nervousness. The global credit squeeze that began last summer still hasn't run its course, and the central bankers fear that the stressed financial system could pull the world economy into a deep recession.

Thus the bankers' decision to shower the system with money, through a new system of auctions that will allow banks to borrow more cheaply than they can through the commercial interbank market. What's unusual is that five leading central banks agreed to act together as a joint rescue committee.

The aim isn't so much to prevent a downturn - the bankers aren't sure that's possible, or even desirable - as to mitigate its effects. Fed officials have decided they need to let the adjustment happen in financial markets, with prices of mortgage-backed securities and other assets falling to levels that will allow the markets to clear.

"Helicopters start dropping bundles of cash," read the headline on a column by Martin Wolf in Thursday's Financial Times. This image of free money recalls the facetious prescription of John Maynard Keynes that to get money in circulation again during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the government could simply bury it underground and encourage unemployed workers to dig it up. This time the bankers won't even have to dig.

Fed officials want to avoid two mistakes made in past financial crises. They don't want to be overly harsh, as banking authorities were after the real estate collapse that hit New England in the early 1990s. Back then, regulators forced banks to clean up their balance sheets by selling off assets in a falling market, which made the downward cycle even worse.

The Fed also wants to avoid being overly tolerant, as Japanese authorities were during that country's long-running financial crisis. The Japanese banks were allowed to keep bad loans on their books, in the hope that they could gradually grow their way out of the crisis. Instead, this lenient policy simply delayed the day of reckoning.

What scares the central bankers now is the evaporation of trust from the system. Banks don't believe each other's numbers; since nobody knows the real value of some of the mortgage-backed securities everyone is holding, they assume the worst. They start hoarding cash as a buffer against their own losses and because they're nervous about lending.

That's what bankers mean when they talk about lack of liquidity. It isn't so much a shortage of cash as an unwillingness to make it available to others. It was Keynes, again, who coined the term "liquidity preference" to describe a situation in which even high rates of return couldn't convince frightened investors to commit their cash.

"The basic problem is that banks don't trust each other. They can't get financing, so they don't lend, and this can cause spillover into the larger economy," explains Ted Truman, the Fed's former top international economist.

A fresh portrait of this stressed system appeared last week in the latest quarterly report by the Bank of International Settlements. The report noted that net issuance of certain mortgage-backed securities fell to $3-billion in September, compared to $30-billion or more a month in 2005 and 2006.

What does this market feel like for players at ground zero? I asked the head of one of the leading hedge funds how he had traded his portfolio Wednesday, the day the joint rescue package was announced. He answered that he had stayed out of the market because he wasn't sure what to do. Trades that looked sensible at 10 a.m. would have turned out to be mistakes by noon.

"If someone would take me out of all my positions, long and short, I'd do it," he said. This is the financial market equivalent of saying you want to start over. Six months into the credit crunch, that's the way many exhausted players are feeling. The markets will have to sink a good deal more, alas, before the vultures arrive to carry off the debris and the process of rebuilding can start.